WASHINGTON - Donald Trump was scheduled to appear in court yesterday to answer charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, a case that will cast a dark and volatile cloud over the 2024 White House race for which he remains the presumptive Republican nominee.

The arrest and arraignment of the former president was set to take place in a federal courthouse within sight of the US Capitol which was stormed by his supporters on 6 January 2021, in what prosecutors say was the culmination of the alleged plot.

The 77-year-old Trump was expected to enter a plea of not guilty at a hearing set to begin at 16h00 (2000 GMT) before magistrate judge Moxila Upadhyaya.

The accusations that Trump and six unnamed co-conspirators plotted to upend the 2020 election is the former president’s third criminal indictment since March, and the most serious of the cases threatening to derail his 2024 White House bid.

Special counsel Jack Smith unveiled a 45-page indictment of Trump on Tuesday, charging him with conspiracy to defraud the United States and attempting to disenfranchise American voters with his false claims that he won the November 2020 election.

“The purpose of the conspiracy was to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud,” the indictment said.

Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor at the Hague, linked Trump’s actions following his loss to Democrat Joe Biden directly to the attack on the Capitol, which he called an “unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy.”

“It was fuelled by lies,” Smith said. “Lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the US government -- the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

Trump is already scheduled to go on trial in Florida in May next year on charges that he took top secret government documents to his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida and refused to return them. 

- Nampa/AFP